In July 2007, Jody Zellen began saving the daily online version of the comic strip Real Life Adventures, removing the text so that all that was left were the empty thought bubbles. She has also been tracing the print version of the New York Times every day, often combining the front and back of a single page (by holding it up to a window). Without A Trace takes the idea of this daily ritual as its point of departure. Each day for a year, a comic image, a trace drawing, and three words from the original comic strip were randomly selected from an archive. These were juxtaposed with live text and image feeds from the New York Times online.

A trace is an action.

A trace is what remains when almost everything else disappears.

Without A Trace drew from an archive of traces, presenting them with ephemeral data to provide a fleeting memory, challenging the title and the notion, without a trace.